In October 2015, we
accidentally started a renovation that we really intended to happen much, much later. We were on our way out the door to have dinner and see a play when I had to run inside to grab something from our bathroom and came in to find the carpet soaking wet. I panicked and ran outside to scream something incoherent at Nick, which luckily he understood enough to come inside to see what was going on. We didn't really know what was happening, but Nick dashed outside to turn off the water to the house in case something had sprung a leak. Then we tried frantically to soak up as much of the water as we could with towels and suck up more of it with our wimpy little wet vac so it wouldn't spread further. It was all coming from the walls around the toilet, so the carpet in the closet and the bedroom was all affected. When we got up as much as we could at the moment and were sort of satisfied that it wouldn't get worse while we were gone we dashed back outside to head to dinner about 45 minutes later than planned.
While we were walking from the car to the restaurant I called the home insurance and told them what happened, asking for advice on what we should do next other than call a plumber. They told me to call a water removal service because undoubtedly the walls got wet and would need proper drying out. So, after we started the claims process we went about our night and then called both the plumber and the water remediation guys the next morning. Plumber comes and says, oh you probably just had a backup in your sewer line. He snaked the drain from the other toilet and said it seemed ok and suggested that it was hopefully just a one time thing, so the water got turned back on and everything seemed ok. Water remediator came and says, ick, this is all black water all over your carpet and we need to tear out all of the carpet and dry out the walls and figure out what's going on underneath the toilet.
If you'll remember, our toilet is on a sort of platform/throne, so there was really no telling what was underneath it aside from the plumbing.
So he got the carpet pulled up, pried off the baseboards, and drilled some holes in the drywall to allow whatever water had soaked into it to be dried out with the use of massive fans and dehumidifiers, which were there for a few days. The water that had seeped into the concrete slab was clearly visible once the carpet was up, and it was also interesting to see where previous walls had been. We have known for some time that this suite was not the original floor plan of the house, and we still don't know what it really was like, but we got to see a little more of what it was before to make more educated guesses about it.
Then we went to New Orleans for the weekend so we could pretend none of this was happening. Wellll, while we were out of town he called and said that it would seem that all of the tile floors in the bathroom would also need to come up because the subfloor of the platform had been constructed of not great materials and so everything was warped from water damage. Luckily, this was all the sort of thing that would be covered under the original claim, so we told him to go ahead and take out the toilet and rip up the tile.
Then when we got back we discussed a little more of what we wanted and what the insurance would cover and decided that now was as good a time as any to just rip it all out and give ourselves a bathroom we would actually enjoy. So Nick spent a day or two ripping out the shower and the toilet throne!
And then it stayed like that for about a month while we tried to figure out what we wanted and when the remodelers could come and take care of the rest. Luckily we could still sleep in our bedroom during this time (as long as we wore shoes to walk on the slab) and it really wasn't all that inconvenient to have only one shower and toilet. Next up, reconstruction!
